An article from Do or Die Issue 8. In the
paper edition, this article appears on page(s)
1-12 .

Friday June 18th 1999

Confronting Capital And Smashing The State!

As the economy has become increasingly transnational, so too has the
resistance to its devastating social and ecological consequences. The June 18th
(J18) International Day of Action in financial and banking districts across the
world was probably the largest and most diverse day of action against global
capital in recent history. Hundreds of actions took place in over 30 countries
on every continent, [1] all "in recognition that the global capitalist system is
based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few and
is at the very root of our social and ecological troubles." [2] But where did this
extraordinary show of international solidarity spring from? And how and why are
such diverse groups building global networks of struggle to counter the
globalisation [3] of misery under capitalism? What follows is a personal account of
the history, context and organisation of the events leading up to June 18th. It
is a story that needs telling...

Contradictions Of Globalisation

International solidarity and global protest is nothing new. From the
European-wide revolutions of 1848, through the upheavals of 1917-18 following
the Russian Revolution, to the lightning flashes of resistance nearly everywhere
in 1968 [4], struggle has always been able to communicate and mutually inspire
globally. But what is perhaps unique to our times is the speed and ease with
which we can communicate between struggles and the fact that globalisation has
meant that many people living in very different cultures across the world now
share a common enemy. An enemy that is increasingly becoming less subtle and
more excessive ('capitalism with its gloves off') and therefore easier to see,
understand and ultimately dismantle [5].

A Common Enemy

The irony is that before the onslaught of globalisation, 'the system' was
sometimes hard to recognise in its diverse manifestations and policies. Abstract
critical theory was confronting an abstract multifaceted system. But the
reduction of diversity in the corporate landscape and the concentration of power
within international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the financial markets, has
clarified things and offered a focal point for protest and opposition. It is a
lot easier to oppose concentrated uniform power than diverse and flexible
forms. [6] As power heads further and further in this direction, those opposing it
seem to become more and more diverse and fluid, and hence much harder to diffuse
and undermine. [7] As the elite, their transnational corporations and their puppets
the IMF and WTO impose 'free market' policies on every country on the planet,
they are unwittingly creating a situation where diverse movements are
recognising each others' struggles as related and are beginning to work together
on an unprecedented scale.

The global 'race to the bottom' in which workers, communities and whole
countries are forced to compete by lowering wages, working conditions,
environmental protections and social spending, all to facilitate maximum profit
for corporations, is stimulating resistance all over the world. People
everywhere are realising that their resistance is pointless if they are
struggling in isolation. For example - say your community manages, after years
of tireless campaigning, to shut down your local toxic waste dump, what does the
transnational company that owns the dump do? They simply move it to wherever
their costs are less and the resistance weaker - probably somewhere in the Third
World or Eastern Europe. Under this system, communities have a stark choice;
either compete fiercely with each other or co-operate in resisting the
destruction of our lives, land and livelihoods by rampaging capital. [8]

Diversity Versus Uniformity

To accelerate profit and create economies of scale, global capital imposes a
monoculture upon the world with the result of making everywhere look and feel
like everywhere else - the same restaurants, the same hotels, the same
supermarkets filled with the same musak. Sumner Redstone, the multibillionaire
owner of MTV, summed up this denial of diversity when he said, "Just as
teenagers are the same all over the world, children are the same all over the
world." On his business trips, he obviously forgets to stop and visit the slums
of Delhi or the impoverished rural villages of Africa. In New York, London [9] and
Berlin, kids may have succumbed to his spell of sameness, as they sit prisoners
of their own homes, their dull eyes glued to the screen. But the majority of the
world's children would rather have clean water than Jamiroquai.

Herbert Read in The Philosophy of Anarchism wrote that, "Progress is measured
by the degree of differentiation within a society." The president of the Nabisco
Corporation would obviously disagree, as he is "looking forward to the day when
Arabs and Americans, Latins and Scandinavians will be munching Ritz crackers as
enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush their teeth with
Colgate." [10] Progress under the capitalist system is measured by economic growth
- which inevitably means monoculture. Just because more money is changing hands
doesn't mean that life is getting any better, it is quite the opposite for the
majority of the world. But by embracing diversity, social movements are
proposing powerful challenges to capital's addiction to uniformity.

Space For Utopias

Capital was only able to become truly global after the fall of the Berlin
wall and the break-up of the Eastern Bloc. The fall of 'communism' not only
opened up the space for capital to be unrestrained, but also gave a new lease of
life to radical movements. [11] For more than 70 years, Soviet-style socialism was
seen as the main model of revolutionary society, and of course it was a total
social and ecological disaster. But its shadow lingered over most radical
movements. Those who wished to discredit any forms of revolutionary thinking
simply pointed to the Soviet model to prove the inevitable failures of any
utopian project.

Now that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, it has become a lot easier for
those of us working in radical movements to conceive of different societies
without having to refer to a failed model. Ideas of utopia can return
unhindered. The space has been cleared and the power of radical imagination is
back at the centre of revolutionary struggle. Not only has the imagination been
freed, it has also become more diverse and fluid than it was ever able to be
under the shadow of the strict monolithic ideology of Soviet socialism. There is
no longer any need for universal rules, there is not just one way, one utopia to
apply globally, because that is exactly what the 'free marketeers' are trying to
do. The radical social movements that are increasingly coming together don't
want to seize power, but to dissolve it. They are not vanguards but catalysts in
the revolutionary process. They are dreaming up many autonomous alternative
forms of social organisation, and they are celebrating variety and rejoicing in
autonomy.

The Ecology Of Struggle

In Post Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin wrote that "in almost every
period since the Renaissance, the development of revolutionary thought has been
heavily influenced by a branch of science." [12] He gives the examples of
mathematics and mechanics for the Enlightenment, and evolutionary biology and
anthropology for the 19th Century. Ecology has influenced many movements today,
and that is perhaps why their model of organisation and co-ordination resembles
an ecological model, working like an ecosystem. Highly interconnected, it
thrives on diversity, works best when imbedded in its own locality and context
and develops most creatively at the edges, the overlap points, the in-between
spaces - those spaces where different cultures meet, such as the coming together
of the American Earth First! and logging unions or London tube workers and
Reclaim the Streets. The societies that they dream of creating will also be like
ecosystems - diversified, balanced and harmonious.

The ecological crisis changes the way many of these movements think and act.
Kirkpatrick Sale illustrates the scale of the biological meltdown; "More goods
and services have been consumed by the generation alive between 1950 and 1990,
measured in constant dollars and on a global scale, than by all the generations
in all of human history before." [13] The level of ecological destruction is mind
blowing, and the present generation feels an incredible urgency about the
future. [14] We know that mere reform is useless because it is clear that the whole
basis of the present system is profoundly anti-ecological, and that there is no
longer any use waiting for the right historical conditions for revolution as
time is rapidly running out.

Radically creative and subversive change must happen now, because there is no
time left for anything else. During the May '68 insurrection in Paris, a message
was scrawled on the walls of the Theatre de L'Odeon: "Dare to go where none has
gone before you. Dare to think what none has ever thought." Despite capital's
rapacious ability to enclose and recuperate everything, the space has now been
opened up, and we can finally pay attention to that message.

Transnational Resistance

On New Year's Day 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) came into effect, two thousand indigenous people from several groups
came out from the mountains and forests of Chiapas, the most Southern state of
Mexico. Masked, armed and calling themselves Zapatistas, their battle cry was
"Ya Basta" - "Enough is Enough." An extraordinary popular uprising which was to
change the landscape of global resistance forever had begun. Five towns were
occupied and 12 days of fighting followed. This was not an isolated local act of
rebellion; through the Zapatistas' resourceful use of the internet, which could
not be censored by the Mexican state, people all over the world soon heard of
the uprising. [15] These masked rebels from poverty stricken communities were not
only demanding that their own land and lives be given back, neither were they
just asking for international support and solidarity. They were talking about
neoliberalism, about the "death sentence" that NAFTA and other 'Free Trade'
agreements would impose on indigenous people. They were demanding the
dissolution of power and the development of 'civil society', and they were
encouraging others all over the world to take on the fight against the enclosure
of our lives by capital. Public sympathy in Mexico and abroad was overwhelming,
on the day of the ceasefire, celebratory demonstrations took place in numerous
countries. In Mexico City, 100,000 marched together shouting "First World
HAHAHA!" Phenomenal poetic communiques came out of Chiapas and were rapidly
circulated through the internet. There was a new sense of possibility, and the
Zapatistas and their supporters were weaving an electronic fabric of struggle to
carry the seeds of revolution around the world. [16]

People's Global Action

In 1996 the Zapatistas, with trepidation as they thought nobody might come,
put out a call for a gathering - an 'encuentra' (encounter) - of international
activists and intellectuals to meet in Chiapas and discuss common tactics,
problems and solutions to the common enemy: capitalism. [17] Over 6,000 people
attended and spent days talking and sharing their stories of struggle. This was
followed a year later by a gathering in Spain, where the idea of a more concrete
global campaign, named People's Global Action (PGA), was hatched by a group made
up of ten of the largest and most innovative social movements, including the
Movimento Sem Terra, the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement (see DoD No. 7,
page 88) and the radical Indian Farmers - the Karnataka State Farmers Union
(KRRS). Four 'hallmarks' were proposed by this group in an attempt to get people
to rally around shared principles. These were:

A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and
speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other
trade liberalisation agreements (like APEC, the EU, NAFTA, etc..)

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a
major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which
transnational capital is the only real policy maker.

A call for non-violent [hmmm] civil disobedience and the construction of
local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and
corporations.

An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.

In February 1998, People's Global Action was born and for the first time
ever, the world's grassroots movements were beginning to talk and share
experiences without the mediation of established Non Governmental Organisations
(NGOs). The first gathering of the PGA was held in Geneva - home of the much
hated WTO. More than 300 delegates from 71 countries came to Geneva to share
their anger over corporate rule. From the Uwa peoples of Columbia, Canadian
Postal Workers, European Reclaim the Streets activists, anti-nuclear
campaigners, French farmers, Maori and Ogoni activists, through to Korean Trade
Unionists, the Indigenous Women's Network of North America, and Ukrainian
radical ecologists, all were there to form "a global instrument for
communication and co-ordination for all those fighting against the destruction
of humanity and the planet by the global market, while building local
alternatives and people power." [18]

One of the participants spoke of this inspiring event: "It is difficult to
describe the warmth and the depth of the encounters we had here. The global
enemy is relatively well known, but the global resistance that it meets rarely
passes through the filter of the media. And here we met the people who had shut
down whole cities in Canada with general strikes, risked their lives to seize
lands in Latin America, destroyed the seat of Cargill in India or Novartis'
transgenic maize in France. The discussions, the concrete planning for action,
the stories of struggle, the personalities, the enthusiastic hospitality of the
Genevan squatters, the impassioned accents of the women and men facing the
police outside the WTO building - all sealed an alliance between us. Scattered
around the world again, we will not forget. We remain together. This is our
common struggle."

One of the concrete aims of this gathering was to co-ordinate actions against
two events of global importance that were coming up in May of that year, the G8
meeting (an annual event) of the leaders of the eight most industrialised
nations, which was to take place in Birmingham and the second ministerial
meeting of the World Trade Organisation which was being held a day later in
Geneva.

For four consecutive days in May 1998, acts of resistance echoed around the
planet. In Hyderabad, India, 200,000 peasant farmers called for the death of the
WTO; in Brasilia landless peasants and unemployed workers joined forces and
50,000 of them took to the streets; over 30 Reclaim the Streets parties took
place in many countries, ranging from Finland to Sidney, San Francisco to
Toronto, Lyon to Berlin. In Prague, the biggest single mobilisation since the
Velvet Revolution in '89, brought over thousands into the streets for a mobile
street party which ended with several McDonalds being redesigned and running
battles with the police. Meanwhile in the UK, 5,000 people were paralysing
central Birmingham as the G8 leaders fled the city to a local manor to continue
their meeting in a more tranquil location. The following day, the streets of
Geneva exploded. The G8 plus many more world leaders had congregated there for
the WTO ministerial and to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GAAT), the forerunner of the WTO. Over 15,000
people from all over Europe and many from other continents demonstrated. Banks
had their windows smashed, the WTO Director General's Mercedes was turned over
and three days of the heaviest rioting ever seen in Geneva followed. The dust
settled, the world leaders stuck in their glass bunker beside Lake Geneva made a
statement saying that they wanted the WTO to become "more transparent!" As if
that was going to make the blindest bit of difference.

June 18th - Keep On Building

It was clear that things were really moving and that we had to keep the
momentum going, and build on the success of the May actions. The question was
how? Then came an idea - why not go for the jugular this time? Why not aim at
the heart of the beast, the pulsating core of the global economy, the financial
and banking districts, the engine room of all ecological and social devastation?
This time we could make it bigger, better and even more diverse. According to an
article in The Daily Mail [19] entitled "Invitation to a riot", June 18th was
organised by "ringleaders" during a "secret council of war", several other
papers mentioned "cells" and "shadowy groups"; while others concentrated on the
"protest by Stealth", the fact that it was all "plotted on the internet" [20] and
was therefore "secret". If you believe the papers, the internet is so secret
that The Sunday Times had to "intercept an e-mail" - which hapenned to be on the
open discussion list - to show to its readers. Apparently the fact that it was
"hatched" on the internet also meant it was "impossible for the police to
estimate how many protesters [21] might be involved" [22] or know what the protest was
actually about!

Geneva 1998: oops that was a director general's posh car.

The media go to extraordinary lengths to make people believe that this kind
of thing can't be organised by fairly normal people, using fairly normal
everyday life tools such as conversations, phone calls [23] and public meetings.
Only 'shadowy' types using weird and highly unusual things like computers and
the internet and meeting in strange, secret places like pubs and community
centres could possibly organise such an event. But how did it all start, and in
what ways was it really organised? If you work for MI5 or the police, don't get
all excited and think I'm about to divulge the names and techniques of all the
"organised anarchists" [24] that you so desperately want to catch. [25] I'm going to
do no such thing, but what I do want to attempt however, is to demystify the
whole process of organising June 18th.

Desiring The Impossible

Those moments where incredible dreams are first shared and aired, where
imagination becomes actual by speaking, are wonderful to look back on. Sometimes
it takes so little, just a conversation at the right time with the right people,
and the seed of an idea is planted and takes root. Like all good ideas, lots of
people were thinking the same thoughts at the same time, and all it took was a
bit of talking to make those dreams real.

Last year for the May '98 actions, Reclaim the Streets had spent some time
trying to work out how to hold an event in the City of London, this was before
it was decided to move the whole thing up to Birmingham. But the 'ring of
steel', the blanket CCTV coverage and the fact that the event was going to be
during the weekend and the City would be empty of office workers put us right
off. However, the desire to do something in this small square mile of land right
on our doorsteps, Europe's leading financial centre, and one of capital's oldest
and most powerful sites, proved too strong. Having a tendency to believe in the
reality of our desires, we couldn't let this one go.

Then during a hot summer's day in June 1998, a conversation occurred between
a Reclaim the Streets (RTS) activist and someone from London Greenpeace (LGP -
the anarchist collective not linked to Greenpeace International) who had been
involved in the Stop the City demonstrations during the '80s. It turned out that
they had been thinking similar thoughts about having an 'event' in the City that
year to bring all the 'single issue' campaigns together around the common enemy
of capital, and a date had already been set for a public meeting. LGP felt that
the time was right to take on such an audacious target. The Stop the Citys in
the '80s had come out of the momentum of the peace movement. In the last few
years, the ecological direct action movement had been getting stronger. There
seemed to be an upsurge in workplace action - the Jubilee line wildcat strikes,
and the Thameside care workers being two examples. Street Parties had sprouted
up across the country with thousands taking direct action and there was a sense
that there was enough momentum to take on such an ambitious and cheeky action.

The idea was taken back to RTS's weekly public meeting and to LGP's. In
mid-August, the first of many public meetings about June the 18th was held in a
community centre in Central London. As well as RTS and LGP, several groups were
present, ranging from the Mexico Support Group, London Animal Action, through to
McLibel and Class War. A date was decided, June 18th, to coincide with the G8
summit. It was a Friday - therefore a work day in the City. An initial proposal
text was agreed and rough ideas of a timetable for the day and different groups
to approach for involvement were discussed. It was agreed to hold open
co-ordinating meetings every month, and these continued to take place right up
to a few weeks before the actual day.

At this point, there was much debate and some pretty dire brainstorming
sessions trying to find a title for the day. Suggestions like 'A carnival
against commerce', 'Laughing all the way to the Bank', 'For a millennium without
multinationals', 'Reclaim the City' and 'Reclaim the World' all were mentioned,
yet nobody could agree on a suitable name. Time passed and still no title had
been thought of, so we stuck to the date - June 18th - with a subtitle of 'a day
of action, protest and carnival in financial centres across the globe'. For some
extraordinary reason, perhaps due to the fact that a date provides the ultimate
in global ownership, no one is taking on someone else's tag, it seemed to work
and eventually, many groups began simply calling it J18. [26]

Good Ideas Spread Like Wildfire

By the end of August 1998, the first leaflet was put together - an A4 cut and
pasted photocopied sheet - and it was taken to the Earth First! Summer Gathering
for discussion. A small number of people thought it was a suicide mission to try
and occupy and transform the city on a work day, when many people would be
unable to attend because they were working, [27] but others were excited by it and
they agreed to take the idea back to their localities and discuss it. By the
beginning of September 1998, an international proposal had been written was
taken to the PGA Convenors' Committee meeting in Finland and discussed with
social movements from each continent, who gave the go-ahead for it to be
networked internationally. Soon after this, an international networking group
was established to distribute and translate the proposal into 8 languages. Paper
copies found themselves in many backpacks and were taken to far flung places on
people's travels.

Preparation pays off - but how many emails before we too get this? (Narita
Airport protestors in Japan in the 1970's)

A J18 e-mail discussion list was set up, where any message sent from anywhere
in the world is automatically distributed to everyone who is signed up. This
list was entirely public, anyone with an e-mail account could join. During the
run up to the action, over 1,000 people passed through the list, and there was a
steady membership of about 400 people. Over 300 different people sent an e-mail
contributing to the discussion, which showed a suprising level of participation.
Someone who had very little experience designing web pages used a web page
making programme and set up a basic web site with the proposal on it.

Academics and corporations agree that the internet has become one of the most
potent weapons of resistance for activists fighting global capital. A PR manager
teaching multinationals how to deal with modern day activist groups was quoted
as saying "The greatest threat to the corporate world's reputation comes from
the internet, the pressure groups' newest weapon. Their agile use of global
tools such as the internet reduces the advantage that corporate budgets once
provided." Harry Cleaver, a professor of economics in the USA, has written that
"the most serious challenge to the basic institutional structures of modern
society flow from the emergence of computer-linked global social movements." [28]

Preparation pays off - but how many e-mails before we too get this? (Narita Airport protests in Japan in the '70s)

Despite the fact that most people on the planet don't own a phone, let alone
a computer linked up to the internet, many social movements in both the North
and South now have some sort of internet access. It's a relatively cheap medium
that enables small groups with very few resources to communicate on a mass
scale. June 18th could not have happened globally without it. The cost of
sending letters or making phone calls halfway across the world would have been
prohibitive. But it's the way the internet spreads ideas rapidly and in every
direction through web sites, discussion lists etc. which is extraordinary. Once
a message has gone out, a simple click of a button can send it to thousands of
people and each one of these in turn can forward that message within seconds.
Ideas spread and multiply at the speed of light.

There is a great anecdote which describes the decentralised multiplying
nature of the internet. Someone in the international networking group sent an
e-mail to an anarchist group in New York, which was then forwarded by them to
Chicago, who in turn forwarded it to Boston and so on to several other cities in
the US until eventually it reached Mexico City, where it was forwarded to
Zapatista supporters in Chiapas, who were friends of the originator of the
e-mail in the UK but who had no idea that she knew anything about J18. They then
e-mailed her saying "Wow, have you seen this proposal? Have you heard about this
action?" The message had literally gone around the world.

Traditional media was also of key importance, and by the time 20,000 red,
green and black leaflets [29] had been printed and mailed out (yes, real stamps and
licking envelopes) to around 1,000 groups around the world, many countries and
groups had already got involved - including the North Sumatran Peasants Union,
the Policy Information Centre for International Solidarity (PICIS) in South
Korea, Chicoco (the coalition of tribal people fighting the oil industry in
Nigeria), the Canadian Auto Workers Union, Green Action in Israel and a
coalition of several groups in the United States and Australia.

J18 was spreading like wildfire. Like a virulent virus, it had taken hold of
people's imaginations. Uncontrollable and untameable, it had moved from city to
city and country to country. Like the financial markets, it fed on rumour and
speculation. Unlike the markets, it needed co-operation, community and hope to
keep it alive.

The Importance Of Process

Although what happened on the day went beyond many people's wildest dreams,
the process that led up to it was just as important. Although it had some
failings, it did achieve much which will strengthen many of the movements who
worked on J18. Primarily, I believe there are three key areas in which the
process succeeded - group building, education and networking, both on local and
international level. I can only speak about the first two in terms of what
happened in the UK, but I'm sure similar processes happened in many places where
actions were organised.

Acting Together

Produced in the months leading up to June 18th were two useful action
oriented publications. "Squaring up to the Square Mile" was a 32 page pamphlet
detailing the institutions and workings of the city. The accompanying
publication was an A3 map of the city, marking financial institutions and
places. See the resources section for how to get your own copy.

In terms of group building, what seemed clear was that the process of local
groups getting together to plan their autonomous actions on the day was
incredibly important. June 18th was providing a common focus for groups up and
down the country. New groups were forming and existing groups were coalescing
and expanding. Local meetings which brought together diverse interest groups
began happening in Sheffield, Cardiff, Newcastle, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow,
Manchester and Southampton to name but a few (eventually there were over 35
different UK groups and places that had their own June 18th point of contact.)
Local posters and stickers were produced, stalls and exhibitions appeared in
cafes and at festivals. With the freedom to act completely autonomously, yet
knowing that there would be many other groups doing actions on the day providing
both cover and support, groups found extra confidence and security and felt part
of a wider process. All sense of feeling too small and too isolated seemed to
evaporate. The success of the day itself will also help inspire them further.
Hopefully many of these groups will continue working together for many years to
come.

Learning Together

There has been a tendency in the UK direct action movement to concentrate on
action at the expense of more conscious thinking and theoretical clarity. [30] The
positive side of this is that it has enabled wildly imaginative actions and
strategies to take place. It has also helped avoid the ideological
factionalisation and bickering that has beset much of 'traditional' politics.
The downside of this however, is that if we want to build "organised popular
movements which think things through, which debate, which act, which experiment,
which try alternatives, which develop seeds of the future in the present
society," [31] then we have to get a lot better at thinking, talking and educating
ourselves and others. June 18th once again acted as a focusing agent, bringing
together diverse people from different 'single issue' campaigns, and getting
them to think about one question - the question of capital.

Few people seriously understand economics, and even fewer understand the
complexities of the arcane currency, futures and options markets that lie at the
heart of the world's economy. There are very few places which will tell you
about such things in clear and simple language. [32] It is in the interest of the
elites to make these things inaccessible and difficult to understand for the
average citizen. In many ways, it resembles the hold on power that has gone on
for millennia within religious societies. The high priesthood would often hold
arcane ceremonies in temples hidden from the populace, and for over a thousand
years, mass was held in Latin which excluded the majority of the population from
understanding it. Now, in their towering glass temples of Mammon, the elite, the
bankers, traders and financiers are still waking up at dawn and engaging in
secret rituals. Aloof and isolated from the devastating effects of their magic,
they sit safely in front of their screens playing with numbers and abstract
mathematical equations, knowing that most people will never make a connection
between these arcane games and the misery of their everyday life.

As "a first step towards unlocking the City's mystique" [33] and to help educate
ourselves on the issues of contemporary capital and financial markets, Corporate
Watch and Reclaim the Streets produced a clear and concise 32 page illustrated
booklet entitled Squaring Up to The Square Mile - A rough Guide to the City of
London. 4000 copies of this excellent publication were distributed to groups
preparing for J18, alternative bookshops and conferences, and a version was also
put up on the web. Tucked inside the booklet was a full colour map of potential
targets in the City - banks, exchanges, corporate HQ's, investment houses etc.,
all to help people planning their autonomous actions. A wonderful way of showing
that theory without action is useless.

Face to face debate is as important as radical literature, and at the end of
February 1999, a 'day of self education' was held in a squatted social centre in
Stoke Newington, London, which involved over 100 people participating in
theoretical workshops and debates about the issues surrounding J18. As well as
this, various people travelled around giving workshops at conferences and
gatherings, sometimes illustrating them with slide shows and the J18 video. This
18 minute video featured an amusing spoof Hollywood trailer for J18, complete
with deep husky American voice and superfast paced edits, an ironic short film
on the resistance to the IMF and World Bank and a couple of spoof adbusters
adverts about growth economics and the G8. 100 free copies of this were
distributed globally, and it was shown in many places ranging from Israeli and
US Cable TV, squatted social centres in Europe, through to benefit gigs in
London. Some people even illegally dubbed it onto the beginning of rented video
tapes!

Sharing Together

As has been described extensively above, one of the central ideas behind J18
was the need to create international and local networks of resistance. But
perhaps describing this amorphous and fluid form of communication as a network
is misleading. Harry Cleaver describes a net as a "woven fabric made up of
interlinked knots - which in social terms means interlinked groups. This is
applicable enough when it comes to easily identifiable, co-operating groups,
such as NGOs." [34] But, what is missing from this description, continues Cleaver,
"is the sense of ceaseless, fluid motion within 'civil society' in which
'organising' many not take the form of 'organisations' but an ebb and flow of
contact at myriad points."

For Cleaver, the perfect metaphor for the type of organising that is
presently taking place between grassroots groups is water, "especially of oceans
with their ever restless currents and eddies, now moving faster, now slower, now
warmer, now colder, now deeper, now on the surface. At some points water does
freeze, crystallising into rigidity, but mostly it melts again, undoing one
molecular form to return to a process of dynamic self-organising that refuses
crystallisation yet whose directions and power can be observed and tracked." The
process of J18 was exactly like this, and this fluidity is one of our greatest
strengths against the rigid constraints of capital.

The Day Gets Nearer - The State Prepares...

It was no coincidence that on the 29th January, a full page article appeared
in The Daily Mirror, with the headline "Police spy bid to smash the anti-car
protesters." Including 10 surveillance mug shots with WANTED printed above them,
the article began "An Anti-Car group is being targeted by police who fear it
plans to bring chaos to Britain's roads. Every police station in Britain has
been circulated with photographs of Reclaim The Streets demonstrators in a bid
to identify ringleaders."

Five months to go 'til J18 and the state had begun their counteroffensive.
According to an article, "A Special Branch document obtained by The Mirror
admits it is almost impossible for police to monitor groups like Reclaim The
Streets. It says: "Increasingly, the environmentalists represent an impenetrable
problem for conventional intelligence gathering. The need for an enhancement in
covert pro-active intelligence by police is clear." Which was great news, and
was further evidence of the fact that the state is completely unable to grasp
the way fluid 'disorganisations' work. They are so used to hierarchy, orders and
centralisation that they just can't see us, let alone catch us. Perhaps this is
why Operation Jellystone, as it was called by the police, did not succeed in
rounding up 'ringleaders' or preventing J18 happening.

The Angry Brigade knew this in 1970 when they declared "We were invincible
because we were everybody. They could not jail us for we did not exist." [35] You
would have thought that 25 years later, the state would have cottoned onto us!

The Day Gets Even Nearer - We Prepare...

J18 stickers, which were printed with over 30 different designs, were
beginning to be seen everywhere - lamp-posts, cash machines, bustops - you could
hardly walk down a street in Central London without seeing one. A Virgin Airways
advertising campaign proved particularly apt for stickering, as Virgin had
recuperated Communist slogans such as 'A revolution is in the Air', 'Up the
Workers' - and orange stickers on the deep red background below these slogans
looked great! A sticker was even seen stuck to the back of an unsuspecting
police officer during the Mayday Reclaim the Streets tube party! [36]

Numerous gigs took place to raise awareness and money. 50,000 club-like
metallic gold J18 flyers [37] which opened up to reveal a quote from Raoul Vaneigem
saying 'To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable
from preparing for general insurrection" [38] somehow disappeared within a month as
did 10,000 fly posters.

Meanwhile, NATO was bombing Serbia back to the stone age in order that
Western Capital could enclose this last enclave of the Eastern Bloc. We asked
ourselves who was going to rebuild the bridges, oil refineries, roads, schools,
hospitals and power stations and who is going to replace the millions of pounds
worth of weapons used every day? Could it possibly be Western oil, engineering,
construction and arms companies? Many of us felt compelled to do something, to
take action. But the timing was dreadful, and as we were are all overworked with
June 18th preparations, there was no way we could organise anything else. Would
the war still be going on on June 18th? The issues were so clearly identical,
but how could we sucessfully integrate it into the action?

With only four weeks to go, the media war began, The Sunday Telegraph's
Business Section front page headline declaring "City faces mass protest threat"
went on to claim: "Banks and finance houses are being urged by the City of
London Police and the British Bankers Association to tighten security and alert
their staff after uncovering plans by protest groups to bring Britain's
financial centre to a standstill." [39] After describing J18 fairly accurately,
mostly quoting the web site, the article went on to quote a 'City professional'
as saying: "We will not bow to these people. We have money to make here". But it
was clear that the City was taking things very seriously. All leave was
cancelled for City of London police officers on the day. The Corporation of
London sent letters out to the Managing Director of every firm in the square
mile (and many outside it) with instructions to circulate the warning of "major
disruption" and the need for extra security measures to be taken on June 18th to
all staff. Two weeks to go and the Big Issue's front cover had a montage of a
businessman on fire, with the headline "Breaking the Banks" and a five page
feature on J18 inside. The heat was on...

Leaked letters from firms in the City showed that enormous amounts of
security precautions were being taken, including barricades erected in entrances
to buildings, extra security guards, minimising meetings with people not
normally in the particular offices, discouraging visitors to the building and
keeping deliveries to an absolute minimum for the day. There were even rumours
that several firms told workers not to bother coming into the City on the day
and to work from home.

One particularly worried and especially aggressive city worker sent an
abusive e-mail to one of the groups, threatening to "smash your pinko faces in."
He sent it via a hotmail account, thinking it was an anonymous way of e-mailing
someone. Within hours a cyber-geek on the J18 discussion list had managed to
trace the origin of the e-mail to merchant bankers Merryl Lynch. The IT manger
there was immediately told of his worker's abuse of company computers - we never
heard of him again!

The Last Few Days...

Now with only a short time left to go, 8,000 red, green, black and gold masks
were printed and painstakingly hand threaded with elastic. Final preparations
were happening across the country: autonomous action plans tightened up in
Bristol, giant carnival heads with sound systems inside were nearing completion
in Sheffield, the London International Futures Exchange (LIFFE) was measured up
so that it could have a wall built in front of its entrance, the web masters and
mistresses put finishing touches to the special web pages which would stream
live video from London and Sidney on the day, wigs and disguises were bought,
freshly painted banners hung up to dry, four different sound systems donated
separate pieces of equipment so that a communal sound system can be driven in on
the day, blockading teams memorised maps and mobile phone numbers, people had to
file past a competing team of police surveillance and media cameras to get into
a meeting, and a crew of Red Bull junkies sat up all night editing a 32 page
spoof newspaper, called Evading Standards, for distribution across London .

A year on from that hot summer's day's conversation, everything was set to
go. Hundreds of groups in 43 countries had said they were going to do something
on the day, and the City of London Police estimated 10,000 people would turn up
for the actions in the Square Mile. But despite all the endless meetings,
careful preparations and military precision planning we knew that only one thing
will enable the day to succeed - the active spontaneous actions of the
participants. Spontaneity is one more vital tool of resistance to join fluidity
and diversity. It is the freedom to play. The desire beyond want and external
compulsion. It's the play of life itself and the very opposite of work, order
and hierarchy.

Revolutionary epochs are periods of convergence when apparently separate
processes collect to form a socially explosive crisis - perhaps it was an
unwittingly accurate description of our times, when the leader of The Express
claimed that it was "Critical Mass" which "planned...[June 18th]...across the
world." You and I know that 'Critical Mass' does not exist, that it's just an
idea - the blocking of rush hour traffic by mass bike rides - and it certainly
didn't organise June 18th. But perhaps there is no better way of describing what
is happening around the world. A critical mass is building - and every year,
every month, and every day it gets bigger and stronger. Reports of strikes, of
direct actions and of protest and occupations from across the world flow along
the same lines of communication that carry the trillions of pounds involved in
the reckless unsustainable money game of transnational capital. Soon there is
going to be an explosion - an explosion which will be so different from any
other revolutionary upsurge that those in power won't even realise that it is
about to transform their world forever. There is much work to be done, but the
hope and possibility expressed during the process and events of June 18th have
brought us one step closer to this wondrous moment...

Footnotes

Globalisation has become a buzzword and can be a confusing term. I prefer
the term Neoliberalism, used in Europe and Latin America, but will use the more
common English term. My understanding of globalisation is best summed up in the
following section of Reclaim the Streets Agitprop: "Capital has always been
global. From the slave trade of earlier centuries to the imperial colonisation
of lands and cultures across the world, its boundless drive for expansion - for
short term financial gain - has recognised no limits. Backed up by state power,
capitalist accumulation has created widespread social and ecological devastation
where it ever extended. But now, capitalism is attempting a new strategy to
reassert and intensify its dominance over us. Its name is economic
globalisation, and it consists of the dismantling of national limitations to
trade and to the free movement of capital. It enables companies, driven by the
demands of the rapacious gambling of money markets, to ransack the entire globe
in search for ever higher profits, lowering wages and environmental standards in
their wake. Globalisation is arguably the most fundamental redesign of the
planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution."
Global Street Party Agitprop - May 16th 1998.

See: Year of the Heroic Guerilla - World Revolution and Counterrevolution in
1968, by Robert V. Daniels, Harvard University Press 1989, for an overview of
the global struggles in 1968. Or for a very readable pictorial account: 1968,
Marching in the Streets, by Tariq Ali, Castelle 1998.

Ironically, this was one of the central weaknesses of the Soviet-Style
state. Uniformity undermines diversity and the capacity to diffuse opposition.

The engines of capital, the financial markets, may be 'anarchic', flexible
and fluid - but they are still governed by one unbreakable law - profit.

A further irony is that the same tools that enable capital to disregard
borders and produce commodities thousands of miles away from their markets, the
internet and cheap air travel, are the same tools which are helping global
social movements to meet and work with each other. Of course I am aware of the
ecological and social costs of the computer industry and air travel. The only
way I can resolve this contradiction is by applying a homeopathic metaphor to
it. The word Homeopathy comes from the Greek and means 'similar suffering'. The
idea is that a substance that can produce symptoms in a healthy person can cure
those symptoms in a sick person. For instance, if you suffer from hayfever,
running nose and eyes, then you take a minute dose of onion, because onion juice
produces similar symptoms (something anyone cutting up onions will have
experienced.) The concept of this minimum dose states that we must only use as
little medicine as possible to stimulate the body's own healing mechanism. So if
we apply this to the use of destructive technologies to enable social change, it
is clear that the amount of air travel and internet used by activists is minute,
compared with what is used for capitalist gain and perhaps this minute amount of
'poisonous' substance may actually stimulate the healing capacities of the
social body.

See Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello's excellent book about global struggle:
Global Village or Global Pillage - Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up,
Second Edition, South End Press, Cambridge 1998.

Despite the fact that a recent government statistics reveal that one in
three children in the UK is brought up in poverty.

Quoted in: Trilaterism, edited by Holly Sklar, 1980, quoted in The Case
Against the Global Economy, and For a Turn Toward the Local, edited by Mander
and Goldsmith, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1996.

Rebels Against the Future - Lessons for the Computer Age by Kirkpatrick
Sale, Quartet Books 1996.

The generations of the '50s to the '80s had the threat of nuclear apocalypse
hanging over them, but that was a question of probability - IF there was a
nuclear war. The question is no longer an if, because there is certainity that
as long as business continues as normal, the biosphere will be irrevocably
damaged. If it hasn't already been so.

The Daily Mail, Monday June 21 1999, p. 23 'Invitation to a Riot' by Steve
Doughty and Peter Rose.

The Daily Express, Saturday June 19 1999, p. 3 'Day of Chaos Planned on the
Interne' by Danny Penman.

So does that mean that when actions were organised using leaflets and
posters, they were able to use their psychic powers and guess exactly how many
protestors would be in the City of London? The irony is that police figures,
weeks before the protest, estimated 10,000 people which was good deal more
accurate than the figures quoted on the day by the majority of the media, which
ranged from 3000-7000.

Phone calls are not normal tools in most of the world. I am obviously
referring to the 'affluent' societies here.

The Financial Times, Friday June 18 1999, 'Organised Anarchists'

After June 18th (and at time of writing in August 1999) the police had 60
officers working on the case full time, looking at 5000 hours of CCTV footage
and other evidence.

There is a very unfortunate similarity between J18 and the name of the
violent ultrafascist group C18 (which stands for combat and then the initials of
Adolf Hitler, A and H the first and eighth letters of the alphabet). None of us
clocked on to this until too late, but some of the media did mention it!

Most large-scale action, especially street parties, have taken place on
weekends. Holding something which required thousands to participate, if it was
going to work, on a weekday was admittedly quite a risk.

See George MacKays introduction to DIY Culture, Party and Protest in '90s
Britain, Verso, London 1998 for an academic but interesting critique.

From J18 international leaflet - quoted from Noam Chomsky. No further
reference available.

If you are going to read any paper which tells you the real stories about
what is going on in the world, who pulls the strings and how the system works,
then you have to fork out 85p for the Financial Times. Or go into a large branch
of WH Smiths, where they trust you to pay just by dropping the change (a few
coppers can do) into a bucket. It will be the most educating shoplifting you
have ever done.

From the introduction of Squaring Up to the Square Mile - A Rough Guide to
the City of London, Corporate Watch and Reclaim the Streets, J18 Publications
1999.

Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism by
Harry Cleaver, see above.

The Angry Brigade Communique 6/7, 1970.

RTS organised a Tube Party in support of Tube workers and against the
privatisation of the London Underground, which took place on May 1st, 1999.

Many people assumed that these gold flyers cost the earth to print, in fact
they cost the same amount as if we had done them in any other colour.